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The Imitation Game is one of the best films of 2014: review

No code breaking is necessary to suss the Oscar odds of The Imitation Game, a handsome and stirring film of Second World War ingenuity that also succeeds as cracking good entertainment.

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The Imitation Game already has five nominations for Golden Globe awards, and is pose for Oscard nods aswell, among them being Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal of code breaker Alan Turing.(Tannis Toohey/Toronto Star)

No code breaking is necessary to suss the Oscar odds of The Imitation Game, a handsome and stirring film of Second World War ingenuity that also succeeds as cracking good entertainment.

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Enigma sleuth Alan Turing and Keira Knightley as his brainy female foil, it’s been consider an awards season front-runner since even before it won the audience award at TIFF in September. Best Picture and Best Actor nominations are assured — and indeed were among the five Golden Globe nods the film received Thursday.

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This is a movie about secrets, not surprises. Of course they would cast Cumberbatch, ever the Sherlockian figure, as brilliant social outcast Turing, the English mathematician belatedly credited with cracking Hitler’s code and, by the way, also launching the computer revolution. As thanks for his efforts, he was hounded unto death after the war for his homosexuality, which was then illegal in Britain.

Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Imitation Game, which won the audience award at TIFF in September and is sure to gain Oscar attention.

And few could top Knightley’s mix of silk and steel as Joan Clarke, the sole distaff member of the boys’ club at Bletchley Park, the top-secret British preserve of codebreakers attempting to crack the fiendishly complicated covert messages created by Germany’s Enigma machine.

You can see all the gears clicking into place, and these include Graham Moore’s sterling adapted screenplay (of Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma) and Morten Tyldum’s sturdy direction. The cinematography and art direction, meanwhile, captures anxious wartime and corseted postwar Britain to a “T” — or perhaps a tea time.

Yet let us not fault a job well done, which The Imitation Game surely is, not to mention one of the year’s best movies. It combines historical fact (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) with the dynamics of a thriller, since the lives of Allied multitudes depend on wresting intel advantage from the Nazis.

There are a couple of daring decisions behind the Oscar-baiting. Norwegian director Tyldum seems an unusual choice to helm such a prototypically British tale of pluck under pressure. But maybe it’s not so strange if you saw his earlier intrigue Headhunters, which involved stealth, guile and deception in corporate boardrooms and art galleries.

Also a little risky is the device of wrapping the 1940s Enigma quest within a postwar drama, set in 1951, that downshifts the larger story into a more intimate and personal one. Turing is being investigated by a determined cop in Manchester, whose suspicions that the math professor might be a Russian spy lead into a witch hunt over Turing’s sexual orientation.

Cumberbatch is the undisputed draw, even before he appears on the screen. We hear him in voiceover calmly but sternly asking, “Are you paying attention?” The statement is meant to arouse our interest as well as that of a Turing interrogator whom we’ll meet later.

Turing’s every word and gesture — he stands slightly stooped, his head tilted forward — reveal him as a man not quite of this Earth, as if he’s a visiting space alien. His indifference to the war (“Politics is not my area of expertise”) and apparent disdain for military authority bring him regular thunder from Bletchley Park Commander Denniston, played by Charles Dance with magnificent fury.

The codebreaker’s complete lack of finesse and social acumen also don’t endear him to his fellow Enigma boffins, led by the suavely sarcastic Hugh (Matthew Goode). A lunchtime offer of a sandwich turns into absurd comedy. But Turing has focus where it counts, and he’s focused on creating a computer he calls Christopher. He believes it could solve the Enigma mystery by combing through the millions of variables in the code’s design to uncover strategic military commands about impending Nazi attacks.

If anything can top Cumberbatch’s towering performance, it’s Alex Lawther’s deeply affecting turn as the younger Turing. Flashback scenes where the shy schoolboy is tormented by other students, finding a friend only in classmate companion Christopher (Jack Bannon), compassionately supply understanding for the grown man’s solitary lifestyle.

There are eye-rolling moments. For example, you don’t need to know all the historical facts about Bletchley Park and Alan Turing to realize that a “Eureka!” moment arising from a chance pub encounter likely wouldn’t pass a Pinocchio test for veracity in moviemaking, although it does make for some dandy suspense.

Nor should we believe for one second that Turing toiled all by himself to build his room-sized Christopher machine, while fending off Philistines from the military, the bureaucracy and his fellow Bletchley brainiacs.

But Tyldum speaks truth in subtle and non-verbal ways, as seen in a clever match cut where the whirring cogs of Turing’s Christopher machine make a cognitive leap to inexorably turning Nazi tank wheels.

The director also exhibits welcome restraint in resisting what must have been great temptation to show the outcome of Turing’s fascination with cyanide and the Snow White legend.

If you’ve been paying attention, as we were urged to do at the outset, you already know what that combination leads to.

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